The Fall of Flight 123

(soft, melancholic music) (airplane alarm sounds) (static creak) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (First Officer Sasaki speaking in Japanese) (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) (thud) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (airplane alarm sounds) - On board a Japanese passenger

flight

on August 12, 1985, an alarm begins to sound. Unbeknownst to the pilots, the plane had just undergone rapid decompression, leaving them struggling to control the plane. Again and again, they try to maneuver the plane back home. However, nothing they try seems to work. The plane is completely unresponsive, but the more than 500 passengers carrying it have no idea how serious their situation really is.

In this aircraft, a structural component has suffered a catastrophic failure, a failure caused by oversight that lasted almost a decade and a failure that would lead to what is now known as the worst disaster in the history of world aviation. (soft, thoughtful music) Tonight's video is sponsored by Incogni. As we move towards an increasingly interconnected world, the idea of ​​online privacy becomes increasingly imperative. Every day, data brokers collect data from you and create a personal profile of your entire life. It is very likely that your details, your home address, are just a search away. And to me, the idea of ​​having details like this lying around is horrible.

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Many thanks to Incogni for making tonight's video possible. Now let's get to it. (thoughtful music) It's Monday. (thoughtful music) Delta Flight 191 is under investigation after a tragic accident. A series of unsolved murders plagues a small Washington town. And on the other side of the pond, in Tokyo, (the car's engine revs) it's rush hour. (ethereal music) It's Obon Week, a Japanese tradition in which they honor their

fall

en ancestors, and thousands of people are scrambling through Haneda Airport to return home to their families. At 6:00 p.m. m., Japan Airlines Flight 123 prepares for its fifth

flight

of the day.

This one is full, traveling from Tokyo to Osaka just under an hour away. That day, Captain Masami Takahama, 49, is training his co-pilot, Yutaka Sasaki, 39, in a Boeing 747. The two are joined by a 46-year-old flight engineer named Hiroshi Fukuda. in the cockpit and another 521 waiting for this trip in the main cabin of the flight. In every sense, this flight is entirely routine. Everything is going according to plan and they are only a few minutes late. (airplane zoom) Japan Airlines Flight 123 takes off at 6:12 p.m. And as the plane moves through the clouds, passengers look out the windows at a slowly fading Tokyo. (Passengers speak weakly) 12 minutes and they are approaching cruising altitude of 24,000 feet.

And just as everyone is settling in... (metal bangs) (passengers screaming) At 6:25 p.m., there is a deafening crash from the back as the bathroom ceiling collapses. A blinding white light flashes, water vapor in the air condenses, forming fog, and oxygen masks

fall

before the disoriented passengers. All of this happens in a matter of seconds, sending everyone on board into a wild panic. (airplane alarm sounds) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) - Put out your cigarettes. This is an emergency descent. (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (soft, ominous music) - The crew begins to realize that the plane has become uncontrollable.

After being granted permission to return to Haneda Airport, Captain Takahama panics and wonders why First Officer Sasaki is leaning so much in one direction. He orders her to relax. However, all the entries made by them are unresponsive. It turns out that all four hydraulic lines leading to the plane's wings are cut. And unbeknownst to them, their vertical stabilizer is completely destroyed. This plane flies without means of stability, and with that, your task of regaining control to land back home safely is almost unthinkable. Inside the main cabin, a passenger takes a single photograph in which we can see the oxygen masks fully placed.

Unfortunately, supply is extremely limited and is only intended to last long enough for pilots to descend to a breathable altitude. However, what they didn't know was that the plane became trapped in what is known as a phugoid cycle, leaving the crew unable to control its descent and, in some ways, unable to descend at all. Again and again, the nose of the craft dives thousands of feet and quickly gains speed before the nose naturally begins to point upward, regaining lost altitude and stalling. Again it dips, rises, dips and rises, all while tilting at angles of up to 40 degrees in any direction.

For now, the crew is doing everything they can to return to Haneda Airport for an emergency landing, but the plane is doing everything it can to avoid it. (melancholic music) (ominous music) The pilots have not used their oxygen masks and acute hypoxia has taken hold. The phugoid cycle is the number one problem, but another threat is the increasingly invasive role of airplanes. To mitigate this, the crew manages to engage the landing gear, effectively suppressing the phugoid cycle. However, over the course of the next five minutes, the plane descends more than 10,000 feet while turning at an angle of more than 40 degrees.

Sure enough, they pull off a full 360-degree downward spiral over Otsuki City and understandably lose hope as each critical second passes. (ominous music) (air traffic controller speaking Japanese) (Captain Takahama speaking Japanese) (air traffic controller speaking Japanese) (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking Japanese) - Turn right! (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) Turn right! (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speak in Japanese) Turn right. (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) Turn left. (Engineer Fukuda speaks in Japanese) (Captain Takahama speaks in Japanese) (Engineer Fukuda speaks in Japanese) (The plane's alarm sounds) (Captain Takahama speaks in Japanese) Full power!

Maximum power! Maximum power! (Engineer Fukuda speaks in Japanese) (First Officer Sasaki speaks in Japanese) (Engineer Fukuda speaks in Japanese) (ominous music) - The plane has descended to just 6,800 feet. Now they are heading in front of Haneda Airport and straight towards Mount Takamagahara. For the next five minutes, the crew fights to gain altitude away from this looming threat and manages to climb back to 11,000 feet. However, this is a false hope as they find themselves in another downward spiral. This time, right over treacherous terrain. (alarm sounds) - Get up! (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (alarm sounds) - Get up! (alarm sounds) - Get up! (melancholic music) (rain patter) (rain patter) (crickets cry) (helicopters hum) (ominous music) In the picturesque mountainside village of Ueno, residents wake up with a persistent smell.

In the air, rescue and news helicopters fly by as they catch sight of something the locals don't see. On the ground, rows of trucks and buses move forward, while the crowd gathers, watching in utter confusion. However, in the midst of all this, almost no one knew the seriousness of what was happening. 34 kilometers southwest of its location, the wreckage of Japan Airlines Flight 123 is burning and scattered across the mountainside. The plane is completely destroyed. The wounded landscape. And to say this scene was bleak is an understatement. (ominous music) Of the 524 passengers on board that night, only four survived.

This was the worst loss of life in a single aircraft in aviation history. This incident is devastating, and the most frustrating aspect of all of this is that it didn't have to end like this at all. You see, just 20 minutes after impact, a US Air Force serviceman named Michael Antonucci spotted and telephoned the crash site. However, instead of calling for immediate support, the Japanese military called off the rescue operation under the presumption that no passengers survived. For more than 12 hours, the plane burned throughout the night, some of them still alive and waiting for help from numerous planes passing just above them.

Planes that saw them, but were completely unaware that help would never arrive. One of the four survivors, named Yumi Ochiai, later recalled her experience that night and explained how throughout the night they could hear children crying and adults screaming. At first it was noisy. However, as the hours passed, these pleas slowly faded into silence. Some lost consciousness, others lost the energy to continue. But for the vast majority, this stillness signaled the agonizing death of lives that could have been helped. It took 12 hours for rescuers to arrive, but by then the scene was a gruesome cemetery. A Japanese doctor stated that if this rescue had occurred 10 hours earlier, perhaps more survivors would have been found.

But everything was silent. (soft music) In the years after the incident, no one would fly on Japan Air, causing the company to take a huge hit to its revenue. With this, both the airline and the Boeing company would pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of the victims over time, an irrelevant reparation in the grand scheme of this tragedy. Even then, however, guilt gripped the minds of Japan Air employees when two of them, a 59-year-old maintenance officer named Hiroo Tominaga, and a 57-year-old inspector named Susumu Tajima, would later remove their life. The first left a note with a single sentence: "I am atoning for my death." Ultimately, investigators attributed the tragedy to inadequate repairs to the plane's rear pressure bulkhead, the rear pressure seal component present on all aircraft.

It was learned that seven years earlier, the same plane suffered a tail incident during a landing, which broke the bulkhead and rendered the plane unusable. During the repair, engineers planned to use a large splice plate to connect the two sides of the crack while reinforcing it with three rows of solid rivets. When done correctly, this would restore the wall's full structural integrity, making it as safe to fly as it was before. In reality, however, the repair was not like that at all. Instead of using a splice plate, Boeing repair technicians used a grave parallel to the crack, effectively rendering an entire section of rivets useless.

This oversight was never discovered and the plane flew in these conditions more than 12,000 times. (soft music) (soft, somber music) This tragedy resonates in the lives of everyone involved and is one of the most unspeakable catastrophes that should have been avoided. It is difficult to understand the horror of suffering a plane crash, much less surviving it. Those who did had to endure unimaginable trauma and loss. The agonizing moments afterwards crushed under rubble, helpless under the night sky, effectively forgotten in a burning desert. I feel terrible for everyone who was on board that fateful night and for the families and friends who were anxiously waiting for them.

Obon is often a time of communion, an annual reconnection with rarely seen loved ones. But the 520 victims who lost their lives that night were never able to finish their journey to see them. Their families waited for those who would never appear, and their memory is forever stained by an incident that should never have happened. That night, no one could have done anything, there was no way they could have known. But after all this, one thing is certain. Their memory, their lives, will always be cherished by those who loved them, and their legacy will endure until the end of time. (soft, somber music) (soft, somber music continues) (soft, somber music continues)